


break free

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Always Female Prompto Argentum, CEO Noctis Lucis Caelum, Dancer Prompto Argentum, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Inspired by BTS, Inspired by Music, Mild Angst, Rule 63, happy birthday Noctis Lucis Caelum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 17:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20439497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: He's not good at being on the sidelines, he's not good at being an audience -- but maybe for this one person in all the world, he can try to shape the narrative without entirely taking control of it.





	break free

**Author's Note:**

> I'm serious about the age gap presented here, which is at least 6 years, but I try to address the power issues in their conversation. If this isn't to your liking, though, it's okay to click that back button.
> 
> Written first and foremost as a birthday gift for my dear Shadi, a few days ago. But also a Noctis birthday fic. 
> 
> Inspired by Hoseok and Jimin at BTS's 2016 MAMAs performance. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEiY65fkko)

Crimson, darker than late nights, darker than the smoke coming up from a used-up wick in a puddle of spent wax and dead candle. Crimson all around that glows with a weird kind of spilling sheen. Runner draped over the black-grain lines of the table, in that shade of crimson that he thinks might actually be -- breathing -- but how could he have ever had the idea? Why does the red shift and move in its sheen? 

Curtains all over the walls of this room, in that shade of crimson that seems to move like a hunter in the still shadows. Four walls and one of them with a small stage, low-set ceiling and the creak of the boards in the floor. Suffocatingly private, and the fresh candles flickering in tall candelabra, surrounded and sheltered by delicate pierced-metal screens and sconces, do exactly nothing to lift those knowing depths.

It feels like he’s woken up in some kind of trap, staked out already and his predators stalking just out of sight and out of reach. Caged and he just doesn’t know where the chain is wrapped around him or where it’s tied down tight. It feels like the prelude to a tomb in the scent of sandalwood and candle-oil, slow choking tightening lines around his throat. And the first thing he does is loosen his tie and the buttons in the stiff collar of his shirt, and he feels the released skin crawl, only a little, when the person offering him a blank phantom-mask look also passes over a glass half-full of rich golden liquid. 

Clink, clink, go the ice cubes in the glass.

It’s all he can do to try and stay civilized and genteel -- the steel in his spine that he’s tried to learn from his mother, that he’s grateful to her for in the now and in the always, running heated in his thoughts. Forcing him out of the slouch that he’s been hiding or protecting his vital bits and pieces with. His veins, his nerves, his heart and all the shattered and agonized weights he carries around beneath it. Some days he feels like there’s a crack widening widening beneath him, somewhere beneath his feet or somewhere inside his heart, and the more the days go on, the wider and wider the fissures go. 

Darker, darker, the yawning depths in him, that thought of the teeth of his demons. 

He has to be careful now, as he turns his head from side to side. No one in this room with him, now, the server having withdrawn -- but that hardly matters when his brain is lapsing into some kind of prey-state, regressing into something fragile, and the flicker of the flames might as well be the flicker of his enemies’ eyes, the flicker of his predators’ teeth. The never-ending dragging pain of his days and nights, dealing with all the different kinds of fools whether they wore business suits or uniforms or pretty much everything else.

Why is he even falling into this particular spiral, he wonders, what is even bothering him? He’s -- on leave. As much as he can possibly be on leave, considering there’s literally no one else to answer to, in most of his life, in most of his work. No one else except his mother, who this morning installed herself in his usual suite of offices and then ordered him soft sweet steely out the door -- taking care to confiscate his business phone, the tablet that has the company crest engraved laser-sharp into its back plate, and the backup smartphone he carries in the lining of his satchel -- and he’d muttered thanks under his breath as he’d passed her, smiling at the keen edge in her eyes.

He thinks. Overthinks. He wouldn’t be as good at his work if he didn’t, but -- the problem with turning himself inside out over the escalating clash between groups of people, groups of stakeholders, groups of the people who work for him period -- is that they can’t agree, not even on things they might have all thought were good, if they’d been asked, one-on-one. They can’t agree. They don’t seem to even want to consider it. They seem to think it’s some kind of divine privilege to rankle and needle and snipe at each other, or else to rankle and needle and snipe at him from a thousand different directions, and when he spends his days and nights attempting to mediate -- he catches more of those blade-words than he should. More than his fair share. As many of them as he actually can take it.

And so: here he is, shut away from them, and the armchair he’s been ushered to reminds him of a throne, high up on some lonely dais, half a fortress. Wide and tall and dwarfing. He can’t even see the door that he entered through, without overbalancing himself, without toppling out maybe. He’s a little too old now to be hitting a floor with his face, at least in the physical sense.

Every day just feels like hitting the floors of his boardrooms, the floors of his offices, with his face, over and over and over again, a hundred impacts in every passing second minute hour. 

And he’s miring himself in this bad place again. The drink tastes like rich smoke and hints of sea-breeze and faint coal, the scent of faraway wildflowers, and he can’t appreciate it, and that’s a fucking shame. It’s disrespectful to the golden flow of it, the sparking candle-reflections in its depths, in the facets of the glass he’s been given -- and reluctantly he puts that drink away.

Rustling muttering all around him, in the red rich darkness of the curtains.

Nothing familiar about these shadows that -- drop softly into a murmur of voices, into a low rasping lilt of some kind of melody -- nothing about it is soothing -- everything about it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It makes him wary, and sort of makes him want to wish he could run. Find the door and yank it open and run.

Where to? Irrelevant maybe. Just as long as he’s not here -- 

Thump.

Lights coming on -- he throws his hand up over his face, prepared for the near-physical force of being blinded, of having to stagger, and -- the voice that rises in a tiny sob of protest isn’t his.

That sound, the too-visible flinch of tense shoulders, the ramrod-straight posture: none of them come from him, either, and he nearly rockets up out of the chair, out of this ridiculous thing. He nearly reaches for the shape on the small stage that has suddenly appeared in this room as though summoned there in the snap of a finger, in some kind of black magic. 

A shape of shoulders and arms and torso and hips and thighs and calves. Slender curves and shivers. A shape of confused hands and feet shifting, nothing about her still, and his tongue dries up in shock. Thorns wind afresh around his throat.

His mind churns on painful edges because -- as far as he knows she’s not even supposed to be in town, much less doing any kind of performing.

“Are you there?”

The swallow, almost louder than the words that followed. Her voice. Rasp of her, tremble of her that he sees clearly in the bend of her knees, in the flick of her fingertips. 

“I’m here but what’s going on,” he says, and he remembers to try to sound calm. Try. He can hear his own words shivering. “Are you -- here for me?”

Smile that’s no more than a shadow-sharp edge, there and gone. “Yes, Noctis.”

“Prompto,” he returns, helpless, seeing her, wondering. Mind churning, because what he knows is, she wouldn’t be around until tomorrow at the earliest, or even the day after that. She’d promised to let him know.

So, so what is she doing, shivering on that tiny stage?

He tries to gather his breath and the even words that might allow them to have some kind of conversation -- he nearly starts, he nearly takes the first step towards her on her tiny platform, but she chooses that moment to tilt her chin at him, as if she can sense exactly where he is and can gesture accordingly. Aimed right at him. The movement of her that he reads as a command. The arch of her neck, the roll of her head to describe a circle. 

Her eyes, seemingly fixed on him. As his are on her.

Not possible, not possible, and his nerves protest the thought of not going to her, the thoughts in his head coalescing into hooked taut burning imperative, that roots him into his chair. Crashing into her still, still as if she’s managed to stop breathing -- 

Like she’s waiting to leap, like she’s waiting to fall.

There is always the shock of her hair: flyaway fluff seemingly made for catching all the different temperatures and colors of light, or else trailing drying on silk sheets, or else falling down into her eyes from the energy of her or the bounce of her. Tonight it’s a perfectly undone flight of white-blonde strands, combined with her current favorite accessory: long strands of tinsel in loud neons, scattered green and blue and purple catching against her skin with every breath. 

Her skin: and he loves the reversed-sky aspect of her. It’s one of the things that keeps him tethered so strongly into her orbit. Windswept, the flush in her cheeks that deepens and deepens and still lets her freckles stand out. The patterns and the hidden writing of her, dense clouds over the bridge of her nose and then artistically sparse around the outer edges of her jaw, of her temples, almost as if painted on, almost as if deliberately marked onto her. He knows that’s not true and yet every time he looks, every time he wants to look for the brush-strokes.

Smear of peachy-pink against her mouth. Mussed gloss, sparkling hints running over onto the lower edges of her right cheek, that makes him think of her sweeping her sleeve over her mouth -- but on a normal day he knows she’ll start over, blotting off the ruined layer on her lips and smoothing a fresh coat back on, so that when she’s done and the makeup has set and he leans in to kiss her, he’ll catch a rogue hint of sun-fruity scent in the corners of her mouth, neatly sweetly slick.

It isn’t just the makeup. Nothing about her right now is -- as she would have it, in her usual array, in her usual way. From the multiple piercings and dangling chains she’s wearing in her right earlobe instead of her helix, to the form-fitting garment that clings to her from shoulders to wrists, chest to waist and then down to the cuffs ribbon-tied around her ankles. The golden lace stitched onto the torso, so it seems to be wrapped around her more tightly than a waistcoat, more tightly than a straitjacket, clinging to her muscles, defining her more strongly in the light-hazy gloom.

And he’s never thought about the idea of her blindfolded, not in any context and certainly not as she is now. The gloss of the material against her skin, the same bloody red as the curtains, sheening as she tilts her head back and -- 

The music crashes up and into his hearing, into his senses: a low raspy voice snarling out a dense rhythm, a frantic rage of a beat wrapping storm-echoes around a delicate twisting melody of strings and piano, and he knows there’s only one reason for him to lose track of the actual words.

Because on the stage that seems far too small to even accommodate the shadows of her moving hands, Prompto seems to breathe in the furious words and the roaring music and then -- she’s off, she’s a flurry of movement, pale hands and pale hair and bare feet. 

The words jerk in irregular tempo, and she dances out that struggle, as if she were wound in invisible restraints. As if she were -- fighting something, fighting to escape. Arms on the move, that stop short of her full extension, and the tension in her hands -- all her fingers splayed out, mutely begging for release. The definitely-held-back kick that she attempts -- all for naught in the next instant because she’s leaping, she’s in flight -- and the moment her feet touch the stage again she’s drooping, she’s stopping, dead and still into some kind of complicated suspended pose.

It drives him crazy that -- she’s doing all this, and blindfolded. For her to look simply like she’s fighting a battle on stage, all alone, and struggling against overwhelming strength or numbers -- for her to wince, for her to open her mouth in silent screams, can only mean one thing. Can only mean the fierce and total concentration of her into this performance, the entire offering of her own body and all her own power into the complicated twists of the choreography. Can only mean that she’s lost herself in the rhythm, nothing more than its servant and nothing more than its master.

He can admit that to himself at least, that he’s paying attention to the way she moves, the way she does her spins, because if he lets himself get stuck on the way her eyes are covered -- the way she’s moving her head as if she’s trying to find the rest of the world that’s now out of her reach -- if he lets himself get stuck on the fact that she seems to be looking for him, he’s probably going to reach for her and that would stop her performance dead in her tracks.

The need to reassure her fades against the more urgent need to -- accept this thing that she’s doing for him, this thing that she’s created for him. He’s convinced of it: the music can’t be hers but every single other aspect is, all of it under her control. Costume and choreography and the challenge of the stage in its minuscule size.

All of it is Prompto’s.

And -- blindfold aside -- he’s caught on the plush firm line of her mouth, and the way she uses it as part of the performance. Now she’s lifting the corner of her lips into a defiant and helpless snarl. Maybe on any other performer it would have been a turn-off: the snarl that remains even as she kicks in place, as she shifts her weight in sinuous steps, as she goes still and pivots into an attitude and then into a leap -- stop, into a pose of corded muscles all along her arms and shoulders, and then she’s leaning backwards to show off the lines of her, body roll to pirouette to -- breathtakingly, an aerial, landing just barely on the edge of the stage.

Throb of the music into a crash, and -- on the tiny stage she turns sideways on to him, in slow deliberate contrast to the escalating pace of the lyrics. Lifts on partway onto the toes of her right foot, and the left describing wide circles from the knee before she mostly straightens it, forward.

Breath. Breath. His or hers, or imposed onto the two of them by the music that still roars, that still rages: Noctis can’t tell any more.

She’s turning her head slowly, side to side, as if looking and looking and -- she hangs her head, and the overhead lights catch on the lines framing her mouth as if she’s failing, as if she’s strangling back some kind of sob -- and she swings her lifted foot for some kind of momentum maybe. The kick of her, the arch of her head toward her leg, and then she lands and -- crumples, into a graceful heap, as the music and the words shatter into silence.

Face down on the stage.

He still doesn’t know how with the expansive strength of her, the reach of her arms, the length of her legs that he can’t forget whether she’s standing still or she’s on the move -- all that, all the incredible beautiful wingspan of her, is contained on the small stage.

And she’s still, again. Not the kind of still he’s familiar with, of her gathering her energy again after spending it in her controlled and gorgeous frenzy, like -- what was that word his mother had mentioned once, meaning it for Prompto? Some kind of myth-term for a woman -- no, a person who happened to be in a female body -- who danced in worship, ecstatic and full of wild raving joy.

Prompto looks nothing like that right now, and maybe Noctis can forgive his heart for the fearful lurch it gives, knocking agonized against his ribs as he reaches for her hand. He had never even noticed that her fingertips had been all but concealed in the overblown sleeves, contrast of crisp cuff against the material that flowed still for all it was nearly drawn skin-tight onto her. Just enough seam and just enough room for her to dance in, to really move in, and -- within the material he thought she was warm warm warm.

No, she’s not still: he can feel her. The touch of her hand wrapping around his, so careful, much too gentle. 

Much too fragile, or -- 

“Am I a stranger to you?” He asks. He needs to ask.

“Not -- not now. You were, when I was dancing. I needed you to be. That was the story.”

He takes a deep breath. Tries to piece her movements together. Spiral, defensive, lashing out in futile swipes, pulling in to try to protect the vitals -- 

Much as he’d been doing -- 

How many times had her hands hovered at the level of her throat? Fingers held rigid, spread in the shapes of wings. How many times had she thrashed, kicked, tried to spring free? The grace of her had turned those movements into true flight and yet -- every time she had landed she had looked like she was drowning. Strangling. 

“I was dancing for you. I was -- dancing you,” and he watches Prompto slowly come back to life, and he moves when she does. She is flowing towards him, and he is gathering her into his arms. Here is his lap for her to crawl into, and here are his arms so she can brace, so she can lift herself back into a seating position. Smell of sweat and dust rising from her skin, the cooling remnants of the depths of her feelings, that she must have been trying to release into the world, shaping them into the gestures, into the expressions of her body. The frantic beat of her heart, that he wishes he could -- sort of hold closer, sort of hold against the thrum in his own veins.

But then again.

“Dancing me?” And the pulse of her is nearly familiar. Not in the sense of holding her close in nothing but her skin and her bones and her muscles, the dark veins shading her wrists. Not in the sense of the catch in her breath as they move together, their own private longings and their own private moans coming to life between them, in their bared skins. Not in the sense of the snap of her emotions, where they blaze in her eyes before she distills them down into the movement that she needs, the power and the fuel for her dancing. “Me.”

“You.” Her hands questing warm and clammy across his face. 

His eyes snap to her face. The half of it that he can see. “Do you want me to take it off? You’re still blindfolded.”

“I know. I can take it off when I want to. Right?”

He can only go off -- the shapes of her mouth, now. The smile that appears, lopsided, knowing. The tilt of her head that makes him think of her listening for more than his words. For more than his intentions. 

Her breathing has slowed completely to match his.

“Trust me, Noctis,” he hears her say ask plead.

“Don’t I?” And he gives in to the longing to -- catch her in the circle of his arms, and hold her in place for a kiss. 

She’s smiling wide when he lets her go. She’s licking her lips as if chasing the taste of him. “That’s good stuff.”

“I didn’t drink the whole thing. Was that part of this?”

“No idea,” she says, shrugging. “I just told them, better make sure they were serving you the good stuff. Because you knew. You could tell.”

“Not always,” he says, softly. “I just know what I like.”

“Something like that.” Now her fingertips are sifting gently through his hair, pulling only enough for him to feel the answering spark in his nerves, the bright sensations she seems to cause, the shocks of her. “And I hope you liked that. What I was doing.”

“I’m -- in a cage,” he says, softly. “That was the story I got. The rest -- what are you, what were you trying to tell me?”

Her answering words are gentle firm real. “That I know how it feels. That I know I can’t help you find the way out. Can’t just be me. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want out, yourself.”

“Yes and no.” He holds her, tight tight tight, for a moment. “You know a little of how I feel. You help me even when you don’t have the whole picture. You -- let me breathe. That’s freedom too. That’s getting out of the cage too.”

“Not for long.” But she sounds so sweet and so kind. Some kind of strange understanding is laced into the lines appearing in her cheeks, in the small area of her forehead that the blindfold leaves visible. “I’m a different kind of cage, sometimes.”

It’s hard to admit that, but: “Yes.”

Sharp smile of hers, like she’s cutting herself open too. 

“But the difference between you and the rest of my life is,” and he doesn’t quite falter, but he does think it through some more. “You’ll change. I expect you to change. Yes, before you ask: that may include you, changing, and pulling away from me. I’m open to the possibility; I was braced for it right from the start. You knew that, too.”

“Yes. And if or when that happens -- ” She shivers, in his arms. He can feel the fear in her drawing tense and sharp in the way one hand drops, so she can hold on to his wrist. 

“If or when that happens I hope I can walk away from you in the right way. I hope you can walk away from me in the right way. I only have hopes, Prompto, I can’t have anything else, we’ve talked about this.”

“And we need to. I need to talk to you about those things. I -- wish we didn’t have to.”

“We do,” he says, gently, meaning to agree. Nothing else to say but her words. “We need to.”

“Yeah.”

And yet he curls around her. It’s like she’s part of the vital heart of him. It’s like she’s one of the things he needs to defend, however he can, no method too small or mean or insignificant. 

Or maybe she’s her own person, only she happens to be someone he wants to see as vital to his own existence. Only she happens to be someone with so much worth and so much promise, someone who deserves to be launched on her way to stardom, someone who can offer the world so much art and beauty. 

Not like him: he’s broken or he’s on the way there. Stranded on the wrong side of his thirties and too constrained by paperwork, chains upon chains of emails and reports and white papers and the stupid red-tape minutiae of a family business. Drowning in expectations and -- not managing them, more like not letting them get to him at all. 

So he has real doubts about the protection he can offer, the launch-pad, the shelter.

But even when he opens all the doors for her, even when he gives her keys to a flat to a car to an office to his heart, even when he loosens the circle of his arms -- she does what she does now, which is huddle closer. He can feel the warmth of her against his chest. 

“What is it that you’re hearing?”

“The rhythm,” he hears her say, after a moment. “Your rhythm. I wanted to, but I didn’t put it in the piece. Would’ve been too obvious.”

“Okay,” he says.

“You still don’t know what I was trying to say.”

“I’m -- not sure I understand you properly.” He sighs, and gives in to the need to kiss her. Just something to shore himself up with. “I’m not sure I came to the understanding you might’ve wanted.”

What a strange sound it is, when she laughs, low and small. “And that’s part of the point. You did get to one of the things I wanted to say.”

“Enlighten me,” he says, softly. 

Her mouth brushing her words against his cheek. “We’re never ever going to be -- entirely similar, you know that, right?”

“I don’t think I want us to be.”

“I don’t want that either. But, Noctis. My point. The thing I was trying to say. It’s -- maybe it sounds too simple. Too childish. But it’s still true, right? -- I understand things one way. You understand things another. That’s not the problem. The problem is in -- either making them agree too much or making them not agree at all. We’re not supposed to go to the extremes. We’ll tear each other to pieces if we do that. I refuse to do that to you.”

“I won’t do that to you either,” he growls, he promises, more to himself than to her. “I’ll destroy myself first.”

“No. Not doing that,” he hears her say. “Anything but that. Not you and not me. I just said, didn’t I? Not, not the extremes. We’re not going there. It’s better if we try to meet in the middle. Closer to you? Closer to me? Does that matter? Anywhere in the middle, I don’t care where. As long as we try.”

He does, maybe, start to see it. “And you -- you danced that. You were trying to find somewhere in the middle? That was the story?”

“Starting from where I thought you were, yeah. Starting from where I was seeing you.”

He smiles, then, and wishes she could see. “You were pretty accurate. I still feel like that a lot.”

“I know.” Giggle, too small still in this suffocating room of red. “And maybe I’m accurate because I spend too much time listening to you.”

He blinks, looks down, lets his mouth twist in a question. “I don’t even talk about my work -- ”

“Not to me. I refuse to listen to you then. But every time we’re interrupted and you have to take the call, or you wake me up and you’re -- not really shouting at anyone present -- ”

And maybe that thought should have made him apologize to her -- he’s as surprised as anything when he sort of laughs in response, when he remembers the last time that had happened. “Is that why you -- got out of bed and went to sleep on the couch? I thought you were in a snit. I thought you were mad at me. Did you want to leave me alone so I could shout at them?”

Unseeing, this next smile she gives him, and that makes her and it seem so much sharper. The mercy of a razor-edge cutting the pain and the hurt away, without hurting the living breathing portions, without spilling unnecessary blood. “It worked didn’t it.”

“Prompto, have you been waiting for me somewhere in the middle,” he says, only faltering a little, because the whole conversation is crashing in on him at last, in all of its layers and meanings. “Is this -- all of this -- ” 

The words run away from him. 

“Wasn’t my intention. Wasn’t what I was trying to do. I just really wanted to tell you where I was. I just really wanted to dance what I thought you were feeling. Sorry, did I hurt your feelings?”

“No. No, it’s more like the opposite. I’m seeing these things for the first time, because of you,” he says, honestly. “It’s -- I just wasn’t prepared to understand. But I do. Or I’m starting to.” He runs his fingertips over the exposed portions of her face, and the thought strikes him, gently. “If I took your blindfold off -- can you keep your eyes closed?”

“Okay?”

“It’s fine, you’re fine, thank you,” he whispers, and the reassurance doesn’t really sound like much to his own ears, but he can feel her winding her strong slender arms higher around his torso -- it’s like she’s wrapping herself around his heart -- and he eases the crimson cloth away from the planes and bones of her cheeks, over her eyes. 

Freckles reappearing, and the flush high in her temples, and the furrowed lines between her eyebrows where she’s tilting her head in his direction. Eyelids fluttering, he can see how her eyes are moving, but she’s -- yielding to him. She’s still not actually looking at him, because he asked.

“We’re fine. You’re magnificent,” he says. “You’re brilliant. I can’t stop myself thinking that. You’re -- not perfect. But you’re good, you know that. Too good to me.”

“Starting to get embarrassed,” he hears her add.

“Sorry. Not really sorry, though. I think -- I want to try to keep meeting you in the middle,” he says. “I think I want to find more of that middle between us.”

“I thought you were going to say you wanted to start, and I was going to have to tell you that you were already doing something about it,” and now, now she does open her eyes.

Oh, what a shock she is, now that she’s really here. The strange flickering light of this room, falling into her eyes. The gently trembling quality of her smile as she blinks up at him. 

“Something tells me you were going to start -- shouting,” he teases, as gently as he can, once he gets over the small sweet shock of her being here with him. 

So she’s not moving, so she’s not in flight -- so what? Just by her being here, just by her choosing to be here, she makes this strange room a little less stifling. 

She makes his life and all its little weirdnesses a lot less stifling.

“Well, you know,” he hears her say, and he watches her flick her hand. The wry wink she tips at him. 

“I do.” He brushes his thumb over her mouth, then. “What would I be like without you, I wonder?”

“If you want to think about it I’m -- not gonna participate,” she says, strange mix of amusement and loneliness in the words. 

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s not. Or I won’t. Not now.”

“You can think it, just -- ”

He kisses her, then, just at the corner of her eye, just so he can feel the lines of her, the warmth still running through her. “Thank you for -- doing this. You see me. People stopped doing that a long time ago.”

“Well they’re wrong,” he hears her say. “I hope I don’t fuck it up either. You deserve it. You deserve to be seen.”

“And so do you,” he says, just as softly. “I’ll keep trying.”

“We will,” she says, “remember. Just somewhere in the middle is good. We’ll -- we’ll be fine that way.”

He feels a little adrift, himself, when she finally catches him up in her hands, when she finally presses a kiss to his mouth like she’s trying to whisper some other secret to him, like she’s trying to give some other gift to him and -- what else could he want? What else could he need? What else but -- 

This girl this truth and all these things that she carries around in her. Her hands still, only on him -- her mouth working against his, and the shapes of the words he thinks she might be trying to press into him -- he fades into that, willingly -- 

He tries to whisper his own thanks into the breaths they have to catch between them. Tries to -- pour his own relief into her -- the kisses burn softly away and he’s left with her name on his mouth, with the lines her hands trace into him.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


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